


still hurts underneath my scars

by theriveroflight



Category: Miraculous Ladybug
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Angst, Black Cat Kagami Tsurugi, Dead Adrien Agreste | Chat Noir, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, Endgame Luka Couffaine/Marinette Dupain-Cheng | Ladybug, F/M, Grief/Mourning, Inspired by Taylor Swift, LBSC Sprint Fic Challenge, Minor Marinette Dupain-Cheng | Ladybug/Kagami Tsurugi
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-12-30
Updated: 2020-12-30
Packaged: 2021-03-10 20:01:48
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,832
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28432857
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/theriveroflight/pseuds/theriveroflight
Summary: It doesn't matter how, but before Adrien can reclaim the ring from Uncanny Valley in New York, he dies.Marinette's world is permanently changed.
Relationships: Luka Couffaine/Marinette Dupain-Cheng | Ladybug, Marinette Dupain-Cheng | Ladybug & Kagami Tsurugi
Comments: 8
Kudos: 29
Collections: LBSCSprintFicChallenge





	still hurts underneath my scars

**Author's Note:**

> This is for the LBSC Sprint Fic Challenge, prompt: "I left a part of myself back in New York."
> 
> Read tags for warnings. The Marigami tagged is unrequited on Kagami's end.
> 
> Playlist:  
> hoax - Taylor Swift // off the table - Ariana Grande, The Weeknd // evermore - Taylor Swift ft. Bon Iver // ghostin - Ariana Grande // in the mourning - Paramore // time to say goodbye (acoustic) - rwby soundtrack // [and more](https://open.spotify.com/playlist/2T14qoNrcFQaDzqPCxCCX1?si=c2FZehKOQpqFXN38vpzekA) (spotify)

Luka knows Marinette is back from the trip to New York. He doesn’t know when she’ll drop by, but he is expecting her to.

And then she does, after the news comes to Paris.

“He’s dead,” Marinette says, collapsing into Luka’s arms. “He’s dead, and I don’t know what to do now.”

“Who died?” he asks. But he knows the answer already. All of Paris is mourning Chat Noir, and a slightly smaller percentage are mourning Adrien Agreste, revealed to be the same person. Ladybug hasn’t been seen since his death was made public, but she was fighting without him in New York.

And he knows that she loved Adrien, and that she was  _ trying  _ desperately to move on but she kept being pulled back in.

“You know.” She seems to be holding back her tears. “Everyone’s talking about it, and I never get any peace.”

“It’s okay to cry, Marinette,” Luka says. He’s  _ trying  _ to make it okay, reorient himself in a world without one of the constants.

“I don’t know what I’m supposed to do,” she confesses. “I don’t know where to go. I lost one of my best friends.”

“Shh,” he answers. “I know.”

And his shirt is starting to soak from her tears, but he doesn’t mind — he just holds her closer, letting her cry until she has no more tears leaking from her eyes, until her breathing starts to even and she isn’t sniffling quite as much.

A butterfly flutters close to them, but he growls at it and tries to hold her tighter, and it flutters away from them.

He passes her a tissue. “It’ll be okay, Marinette.”

“Are you really sure about that?” she answers. “Because I don’t think anything will be okay ever again.”

“You just have to believe.”

And then he realizes why exactly she was hit so hard. Because she’s Ladybug, and she lost her  _ partner. _

“He was a part of me,” she says. “He became a part of my identity too fast, and now I have to untangle myself from him and I don’t know what to do. Where to start. How to do it. I have to move on. I have to keep going. But I don’t know who I can trust.”

“You can trust me,” he says.

“Not with…” Something seems to come across Marinette’s mind, as her expression hardens. “I’ll…see you soon, okay?”

“Of course.”

She leaves, and even though he knows that she’s still mourning he can’t  _ help  _ but think that it’s different now, that he actually has a shot because his competition is  _ dead,  _ and how morbid is that? He didn’t actually want Adrien to die. He doesn’t want  _ anyone  _ to die, if he can help it, but death is a natural part of life. He knows that, but he still naively hopes that the people he loves won’t be taken from him.

(One of them already has. He loved Adrien, as a friend and perhaps something more.)

(But Marinette is one of the few that has become a part of his heartbeat, her and Juleka and his mother, the people he loves most.)

The next time Ladybug goes out to fight an akuma, it’s with a female Black Cat user that doesn’t speak anything beyond  _ Cataclysm,  _ stoic but somewhat sad. The new Chat Noire, as the media has called her — Ladybug slips up once, calls her “kitty” and they both flinch. It isn’t the same as the effortless chemistry between Ladybug and Chat Noir, it isn’t the same as the way things used to be, but there’s nothing, nothing, nothing anyone can do about it.

Or so he thought.

Marinette comes back, as he suspected she would.

“Do you know?”

“About what? That you’re Ladybug?”

“I…yes. I could have brought him back. I could have wished for him to return just the way he did before.”

“But that kind of power has a price, doesn’t it?” He’s read enough of the original fairy tales to know that magic has a cost, a give and take element to it, just like physics.

“It does,” Marinette answers, barely a breath.

“So, you didn’t want to pay that price.”

“Not when it’s an equal exchange. Someone would probably die in his place. Adrien wouldn’t have wanted someone else to die so he could live.”

“I agree,” Luka says. “How’s working with the new one?”

“I picked her. I’m in charge of choosing now. And I don’t…it’s what I have to work with. I trust her a lot. And she has the right spirit. I think the kwami will help her, too. She’s mourning Adrien too.”

“I’m sure,” he says.

“I thought about asking you to do it, actually. After I figured out that you know I’m Ladybug, I considered asking you to take up the Black Cat. But I couldn’t. I have to separate my love from my duty. Putting them together didn’t work out.”

“Wouldn’t make a good Black Cat anyways,” he says, shaking his head. “It’s not right for me, just like the Snake didn’t work for Adrien.”

“It’s not that Adrien was  _ unfit.  _ He could have been, in a universe where someone else had the Black Cat.”

The musing actually feels good, to try and talk about it, to be  _ able  _ to talk about it like this.

He holds her close. “It’s okay to still be mourning, and it’s okay to have moved on.”

“I was already starting to,” she says, “I was trying so hard. And everyone kept fighting me on it. I hadn’t moved on. I was trying, and they kept trying to stop me. And now everything is broken, and I have to pick up the pieces, and it’s all too fast.”

“Emotions don’t work on human levels of speed. You can think it’s too fast to be in love. But denial has never gotten anyone anywhere good.”

“Really.” Marinette’s voice is flat and skeptical. “Somehow I doubt it.” He doesn’t know the war raging inside Marinette’s mind, he doesn’t know what she’s thinking. He just knows that he loves her, with as much of him as he can.

In the coming weeks, Kagami drifts in and out of their circle — she lost Adrien, too, the boy she claimed to love. Sometimes Alya and Nino swing by, but they’ve always been closer to Marinette, and he can tell that they’re supporting her too.

The new black cat still hasn’t given a name. Ladybug tells everyone that she isn’t a replacement. That she is different and  _ new. _

“No one is replaceable,” the Black Cat proclaims, clipped — but it’s the first words she’s said besides “Pound it” and “Cataclysm,” so everyone makes a big deal out of it.

He sometimes sees how she looks at Ladybug. But he’s not jealous, because he knows. And sometimes it’s still astounding that she is somewhere close to loving him back, because she’s so exceptional and he’s just Luka Couffaine, a boy with a guitar and dreams of stardom.

Marinette has  _ always  _ been exceptional and he has  _ never  _ been good enough for her. In a way, she and Adrien deserved each other in ways that he could never live up to, the golden boy and the glittering girl. None of them were ever perfect, but he is perhaps the most flawed of them all.

Even Kagami — based on everything (the new ring around her finger; the new Black Cat’s silence, skin, hair; the way she spat  _ no one is replaceable;  _ Marinette’s choices limited; the talks among the three of them, all fumbling for something to cling to-) the new Black Cat — loves Marinette too, and she possesses that same kind of special-ness that Marinette has and Adrien once did.

But he’s not afraid of what’s to come. Marinette’s chosen him, after all, and she’s always been determined to stick the course.

When the two of them get a chance to be alone again, she asks him if she can kiss him.

He answers yes, as he always would to her, and the kiss is filled with desperation and longing and sadness and a bit of the salty sting of tears. He knows Marinette can probably taste his lip balm — and he can taste some kind of mint.

They come up for air before diving back in, hands around waists and pulling each other close.

If she needs this, it’ll be the support he offers.

“Marinette,” he whispers.

“I love you.” Marinette’s voice is hoarse, and he notices that her eyes are redder than they were before, and that she has been crying.

“I love you too,” he answers.

It is not as simple as it seems, though. The ghost of Adrien seems to linger between them, in his hesitancy to touch her, in her reaction to falling rain, in the way he comforts her, in the way she still cries on the worst of days.

Sometimes the others ask questions. He tells them that she was the one who asked him, that she initiated, and if she was ready to initiate he wouldn’t say no, that he couldn’t resist her, that he could  _ never  _ resist her.

Kagami reacts with understanding. Alya and Nino react with skepticism, at first, but they accept him into their fold, and they have a couple double dates where they all try their best to deal with everything that’s happened.

They’re all still trying to deal with it, even two months after the class first returned from their trip, all subdued, with the news of Adrien’s death coming to his ears not long after.

“I lost a part of me,” Marinette says. “I know I said that he was a part of me, that I managed to entwine us so tightly that I had to untangle myself from what’s left, but there’s still something missing, and I know what it is but I won’t get it back. I’m  _ not  _ getting it back.”

“You can still be whole,” he tells her, but he isn’t quite sure what to say. “You might not be able to get exactly that thing, but you’ll pick up other parts along the way, and they won’t be the same parts, but people change. You don’t have to replace that part or repair it. You just have to find other parts to attach.”

“I don’t know if that helps. That was a lot of words.” She laughs a little bit at that, but it sounds helpless and sad despite being what it is. “I’m not sure that I got it all.”

She leans into his shoulder, resting her head there. “Is it going to be okay?”

“I think it will be,” he answers, leaning back into her.

For a single moment, at least, all is well. Adrien’s ghost still lingers around them, a little, but its influence is lighter than it once was. He doesn’t think it will disappear altogether, but in the mourning something new has arisen, and he would be a fool to throw it away.

**Author's Note:**

> be warned that if I continue this universe it will be lukamarigami because I will always have a soft spot for polyships
> 
> follow me on my writing Tumblr beunforgotten for content if you want!


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